Concerning the Silly Notion that "God" must refer to the babytalk version thereof

[Othersider]

@Triskadecamus

Perhaps I think of God in anthropomorphic terms, and limited aspects, because I cannot think in divine terms, or infinite aspects.

Ya think?

That seems like it also describes my perception. I conceive that if God is greater than I (which is most likely), that it’s likely I can’t aptly perceive him given my rudimentary mind and senses.

I have occasionally pondered the possibility that, similar to the fact that some people may “need” something to believe in, some other people refuse to conceive the possibility that there is something greater than themselves, that something might exist that they cannot aptly perceive. I don’t think that most non-believers have this complex, but I think that some do. And that strikes me as arrogant, but that’s just my humble opinion.

[blowero]

@AHunter3

The sense of cameraderie and community on the Straight Dope Message Board is a thing that is present (that may be arguable, I suppose, but let’s stipulate it). Is it an entity?

Remember, I said it’s either an entity or it’s a product of your own mind. What is “cameraderie”? I would say it’s an idea. I see no evidence that ideas come from anywhere other than the mind. I would consider it a very strange language construction to say that cameraderie “communicates with me”.

My puppy has a certain endearing charm. Is that charm an entity?

Does your puppy’s charm communicate with your puppy? I would say no; Your puppy’s charm is a characteristic of your puppy, not a separate entity that’s communicating with your puppy.

I don’t mean to sound hostile — I guess we’re sitting here reading each other’s posts and thinking “Wow, this doper really doesn’t get it!”.

To be honest, that is what I’m thinking about you. Maybe we’re arguing at cross-purposes.

From my vantage point, it seems like you’re bringing along unquestioned premises about God and what God must be in order to exist. So I’d ask that you see if you can explain what there is about God as I’ve described God (which is somewhat more consistent with core historical theological beliefs than you might think) that makes “entity” apply to God but not to the abstractions “the sense of cameraderie on SDMB” or “my puppy’s endearing charm”.

I think I’ve explained that already. If you are defining God is only an idea, on a par with those other ideas that you have mentioned, then your definition is seriously out of whack with billions of other theists on the planet.

Meanwhile, I’ll reiterate what I said in the OP: if God is eternal, God is unchanging and therefore isn’t mulling over what I just prayed about, considering it, weighing it, and then reaching a conclusion.

To me, an entity is one who does that kind of thing.

I think the question of whether God is eternal is seperate from the question of whether God is an entity, or merely an idea. If you want to say that God exists only in the same way that ideas or emotions exist, I guess that’s your prerogative, but I wouldn’t be upset when the majority of the planet doesn’t agree with your definition. I would ask that you clear your mind for a second, stop telling yourself “Blowero doesn’t get it”, and actually try to consider what I’m saying.

[Lilairen]

@FinnAgain

Can we truly say that? What about those people who worshiped, say… Set: Lord of Storms?

Been thinking over this for a while, and have more to say. (Speaking as a polytheist and, incidentally, as a devotee of Set.)

“God of X” constructions, especially when they contain the connotation that the god in question is the force that causes X to happen, are the babytalk version of polytheism. There are a double handful of more nuanced expressions.

When gods are associated with certain things, it’s generally an indication that something about the event is taken as essentially the same as something about the god. (This is vague; I don’t know how to get it into better language.) This is a process that is constructed very similarly to metaphor or allegory (for sensible reasons; I consider myths to be, fundamentally, allegory). “Set is storming” is babytalk of much the same type as “Thunder is the angels bowling”.

But what does it mean to associate Set with storm? Perhaps (in line with the OP’s worldview) Set is the essential nature of storm, the sort of abstraction that comes of a personification and distillation of that. One can see this in one of the ways He functions in the cosmology, as a force within the order of nature that batters against the roof and finds out where it leaks.

One can no more persuade Set not to storm than one can persuade the sun not to shine or Dopers not to argue. If His nature is the nature of the storm, then that is what is; asking the storm to be something other than what it is isn’t going to be especially effective. (And in the case of the Egyptian gods in particular, that sort of self-negation is pretty much the antithesis of their worldview; self-negation is one form of the cardinal evil, personified as Apep, whose scaly ass Set beats on a regular basis.) The storm has to be dealt with on its own terms as what it is.

Another way of looking at it is that natural phenomena are seen as sharing essential essence (as opposed to being identified with the essential essence). So Set is associated with the storm because the storm looks like Set from the right angle. I think this process is much like having things in the world remind one of friends or lovers – something about that thing is akin to the experience of that person, so they are on some level symbolic of the other, at least to the individual with the association. Gods are cultural experiences; thus, they develop cultural associations.

Here the association is one of resonances and overtones; the storm has some of the same overtones as the god, or vice versa, and thus they are linked. This is probably closest to my personal worldview, for what it’s worth; I’m not actually sure, as it’s not terribly important to me.

To get something closer to the Jungian archetype form of polytheism popular among some neopagans, the god could be seen as a personification. Rather than an entity in its own right, it is the construction of a person (or culture) that makes it more possible to deal with certain things. If Set is the storm in this way of approaching things, then Set is, in some ways, a person, an anthropomorphic entity, which means the storm is no longer quite as impersonal: it is associated with a being. That being may be benevolent, malevolent, or neither; it has its own desires and agenda, and it may be that people can treat with it about its agenda in order to get desired results. The being may accept or reject those attempts; either way, it is an interaction between entities, not the machinations of something outside of thought that happens. Some people find that sort of thing soothing.

Argh. There’s more, and I am so not figuring out how to get it into language.

[AHunter3]

Argh. There’s more, and I am so not figuring out how to get it into language.

I sure know that feeling.

Triskadecamus:

Perhaps I think of God in anthropomorphic terms, and limited aspects, because I cannot think in divine terms

I understand using and holding onto whatever understandings we catch ahold of even as we acknowledge them to be insufficient; especially when it comes to putting them in words (what I can understand far exceeds what I can verbalize and I assume this is true for others with similar experiences). But — pardon me if this sounds snobby or elitist — I think almost anyone who can get past 6th grade can do better than the anthromorphic version when you’re trying to communicate with someone for whom all this “God stuff” makes no sense.

To nontheistic folks for whom this stuff is foreign and unlikely-sounding —again, I want to stress that what you’re looking at is us trying to put stuff into words that we’re generally not very satisfied with. A large part of what I’m asking is that you refrain from being overly literal-minded when dealing with theistic folks if we indicate that we aren’t speaking in the concrete ourselves.

Meanwhile, as long as I’m at it, the biggest bloc of irritations I have with theistic folks in general is the combination of the “babytalk” stuff plus the insistence that the words themselves with which they’ve expressed some theistic viewpoint are the right and only way to describe those things. OK, that’s really not a combination of two things so much as manifestations of the same thing (i.e., it’s nearly always the ones who blindly parrot babytalk-religion phrases without having any personal understandings behind them who insist that saying the words and getting others to say the same words is what it’s all about.).

[Triskadecamus]

AHunter3,

I suppose it sounds childish, to basically take a description of me, and say that I think of God in those terms. I’m a mature human male, with a long gray beard. It was the exact image that Michelangelo used, and it lives in the mythos of human imagination. It is, of course wrong. But it is right, too.

We don’t have an accurate image of God.

There is none. Trying to make up one isn’t an exercise that will benefit me. And when He decided to make Himself easier to see, to humans, He became a man. With a beard! (OK, probably not a gray beard, since Jesus died so young.) Now, the image of Jesus as a man with a beard falls short of the reality. But the reality includes that.

I know a lot of people who are just not smart enough to understand the point that Jesus was one aspect of God, made flesh, and at the same time a man, and also a spirit of love. Trinity is a very subtle concept. But I don’t think that that lack of intelligence is spiritually important. I know folks who cannot understand the words “God loves you.” But I think He does anyway. I generally think our understanding of the matter of our salvation is pretty much insignificant. Our mental “images” of God so limited that yours, mine, St. Augustine’s and some illiterate legal moron’s are much closer to each other than to the actual reality of Him.

So, what difference which wrong image I keep in my mind and heart?

Tris

[AHunter3]

There is none. Trying to make up one isn’t an exercise that will benefit me. And when He decided to make Himself easier to see, to humans, He became a man. With a beard! (OK, probably not a gray beard, since Jesus died so young.) Now, the image of Jesus as a man with a beard falls short of the reality. But the reality includes that

I’m not Christian, myself. I have a rather profound “hero-worship” for Jesus of Nazareth. I do not, however, parse the notion that “God made himself easier to see and therefore went down and became Jesus”. I think Jesus of Nazareth was God in the same sense that I am God and you are God and the Boston Strangler was God; I also think Jesus of Nazareth was a messiah, prophet, message-bearer, person in touch with God, in a sense that the Boston Stranger, for example, definitely was not.

To study what Jesus of Nazareth taught (the Sermon on the Plains, the Sermon on the Mount, etc) and consider that these teachings reflect what “fits” for humans and for the species as a whole, as life principles and social organizing principles — yes, insofar as this is not merely “a” part of the whole “music of creation” / entiretly of “that which is”, but is, in fact, of central impact and importance for us, at the core of the Big Questions, one can certainly “find God” therein.

But to point at Jesus of Nazareth, the actual person who lived ~2000 years ago and say “There, that’s God. If he was left-handed, God is left-handed. He’s male, so God is male. If he peed in his diaper-wrappings during his first 24 hours of life, that was God being incontinent” would be among the things I’ve described as babytalk versions of God.

I don’t think all less-than-perfect-&-complete imates of God are equally wrong. (If this were not so, conceptualizing God as a golden calf statue and worshiping it as such would be indistinguishable in accuracy from any other practice. A point the atheists will probably acknowledge quickly enough).

One need only refer to God at all, verbally, in order to communicate with others. And it is successful communication that I’m focusing on here.

[Scott_Plaid]

@AHunter3

I think Jesus of Nazareth was God in the same sense that I am God and you are God and the Boston Strangler was God; I also think Jesus of Nazareth was a messiah, prophet, message-bearer, person in touch with God, in a sense that the Boston Stranger, for example, definitely was not.

I still stand by my statements earlier in this thread, but when I saw the above, I could not help but remember a section in the novelThe Widow’s Son (The Historical Illuminatus Chronicles) in which a number of bible versus are quoted which give much trouble to the literal view of the bible, as understood by the narrator. They would seem to support your viewpoint, albeit, not in the philosophical way you mean, but as ignored ideas of Christianity. My own copy is buried to deep to find, and the R.A. Wilson fan sites doesn’t seem to have them. Too bad.

[Triskadecamus]

Ah, I have missed the point entirely!

I never intended to explain God in terms that “make sense.” I don’t much think it does make sense. Every aspect of the universe exceeds my perception, in range, scope, detail, history, and potential. I bump my head against that all the time, as an exercise in learning and mental growth. But I don’t expect to understand God at all.

My faith is a matter of miraculous love, experienced in ways beyond my own understanding. The personification of God is just an expression of my love for Him, since it is the only way I can get my emotions around it. I don’t much try to explain His nature to anyone, only my reflection in Him. It is my belief that that is the “reason” that the Savior was human. Being human was the divine equivalent of walking a mile in our shoes. But I don’t try to argue that as a philosophical or theological point. It’s just my own emotional handle on it.

Explaining the true nature of God is beyond me.

Tris

“Don’t you want somebody to love?” ~ Grace Slick ~

[FinnAgain]

total tangent, but Scott, I believe they just re-released the Historical Illuminatus Chronicles

[Scott_Plaid]

:eek: